Com. This particular clip is with Russ B. What are we talking about a subject that a lot of artists don’t get into enough? It’s more than just. How do I build a fan base on Instagram, it’s more about? How do you choose where you blow up? It gets so much deeper and nuanced.
So I’m going to go ahead and let Russ V talk and then I’m going to give you all some gems at the end. So you know you know how in another, in other paths like you know, if you’re trying to be a doctor or a lawyer, there’s kind of like a set path or patterning or things that you need to do like you need a good I school or college Or grad school in it, you know, there’s like there’s a way to track your progress per se.
Yeah, there’s like a lot of different things that you know as an artist that you can that you can do that. You might, you might not necessarily know if they’re like the right things to do, or it’s just just a lot of different things that you can do like performing trying to get on somebody’s tour or you know, going and network out with music executives or like really Honing and focusing all your attention on social media like just a lot of different things that you can do so.
My question to you is with, I guess some of the stories and comic story that you’ve heard recently. What are some of the most important avenues? I guess I’ll call them to like focus on when you’re trying to you know when you want to come up trying to do it and make it for yourself yeah. Well, obviously the elephant in the room is social media. You know, that’s the most obvious. I don’t think social media is everything some people preach that it’s Dan they’re everything I don’t believe is everything, but I believe you know it is what it is and you do have to play to it.
After that, I would say really just really just um like creating. I feel like a lot of artists, are waiting on like a label or like to be big to like actually monetize the dip themselves and actually like create their brand identity. I think that some artists should be doing on the ground level. I think you should in in 2019. I don’t care if you have seven fans. If you have seven fans, you need to sell seven t-shirts.
You know I’m saying you need to you need to like brand yourself now, because that’s actually the whole game. You know you look at like Travis Scott’s and everything and they’ll sell 500,000 and actually sell 500,000. He was selling clothes. Nikki was right, you know I’m Sam, but that’s actually the way these artists coming in the game now, especially like going into like this next decade, like yeah artists, should you know our artists with a thousand fans without a deal should be selling like 200? Something 200 pieces of experience to two hundred people.
You know um and I think once artists really have that mindset of just like complete independence and just like figuring it out like like, like a real business. That’s really like that’s really the route to go. You know what I’m saying so as far as like. What’s most important, I really can’t say anything is more important. I’ll tell you one thing: as an independent artist, don’t focus on radio, don’t focus on television um! Those things.
Are they don’t matter boy? As far as the club’s you can you know without the clubs but depending on where you live, I wouldn’t suggest it. You know you said you’re in like Idaho, I’m in the Iowa right now so Iowa you can skip out on the clubs yeah I mean like that’s, not good, [, Laughter ]. You can probably skip out on the cloud, but you know it also really depends on the artist man. I can’t stress that enough.
Some artists are YouTube’s dream. Some artists are Spotify as dream. Some artists are: are the shit on Twitter? Look at lil Nozick’s, some artists. You know is really depend on the artist. You know some artists are hard. Are you know? It really just depends on the artist man, because, depending on what you’re talking about who you’re talking to all of these different things, that’ll tell you where you belong.
You know if you’re, if you love dancing and you’re 16 years old, and you rap I’m not going to tell you, go to Twitter, I’m going to tell you go tick-tock, you know what I’m saying I’m going to tell you go to Triller, I’m not going to Tell you go to Twitter in there, so it really depends on who you are and um. You know the type of music you’re making and all of that alright, alright, I got a start here.
Brush v said something that was, it was pretty big. I don’t know if you caught it, but he said. Branding yourself is the whole game. Today he said go ahead and get that merch started. You have seven fans, you should be able to sell seven shirts and get that whole business in line, because branding yourself is the whole game. Is that true? I wonder I know a lot of people are wondering that, yes, it is true in so many ways when we look at the fact that so many of the artists are looking at.
How do I flip the brand that I built into actual income when we look at the top of the Billboard charts and that’s where artists, even the big artists, will have a whole lot of streams right? Who have all these record sales quote-unquote, whatever they’re? Still looking to monetize outside of music, you need to be building your infrastructure to do that as soon as possible. It doesn’t mean that you can’t focus on building your music and getting your streams.
First, a lot of people still need to start there, but at the same time breath you got to monetize right and to monetize, and especially, if you want to consider yourself independent means you have to have business systems in place. You have to know what your merge plan is going to look like you, don’t have to sell merch immediately but know what the plan is going to look like start getting into those designs.
Get an idea of what your system would look like other things that you can sell on other ways that you can monetize outside of just a regular tour show right. Can I do private sessions with my fans somehow online? How can I connect with them and what kind of calls can I do? Maybe there’s there’s so many different things that you can touch on. Maybe I do shoutouts to my fans, birthday shoutouts was my friend fans they charge, for maybe I don’t charge for it.
There’s so many ways to flip this, you know, maybe you can write little custom songs for your fans, there’s so many ways to flip it, but you have to get those business business systems in place and see the opportunities because, especially as an indie right, you want To be able to figure out how you’re going to bring in more income – and you are a business and your brand is the core of how you flip that brain, because we’re not working on needs.
This is Anna knees markets where we’re selling soap, or I mean you know some people argue that your needs so but we’re selling – I don’t know some medicine or something like that that people need to live. They don’t need your music, so you need to have a brand that makes them want to make some kind of exchange with you. That’s first and foremost, we got to start there. Of course, there’s some people who just have music and most of their business and is built on selling music through placements and and you know just scoring and in so many other ways of monetizing music, where you don’t have to be a front facing artist.
But if you want people to see your face as an artist and you’re building that type of brand, the typical celebrity artists brand, whether it’s a huge, celebrity or a minor, celebrity you’re trying to build a brain, and that is the core. That’s what it’s all about. Now something else I know, a lot of people are really weird on this pick, your platform everybody’s, like you know. Why are we even talking about this? Because we already know what the platforms are? We already know that you need to be on IGN YouTube or we need to be on.
I don’t know, maybe tick tock today. I know that that’s what some people are thinking, but the reality is no. You need to be able to reverse engineer and we’ll talk about that in a second, your particular brain, and how you decide where your particular brand and fan base will lead you to a particular platform. Why is that? If well here’s a perfect example there’s an artist. I just spoke to we were sitting down yesterday and he was telling me that most of his fans right are on Facebook double his fan base, and this isn’t like some old guy he’s a pretty young guy um and he has there’s a matter of fact.
And it’s not even like he only has a little views on YouTube. He has articles with a million views, but he’s like literally, if my article has 1 million organic views on YouTube, then I have 2 million on Facebook and really, I think one particular article. I probably added up to like 13 million on Facebook went with all the people who shared it to other blogs and other bigger blogs on Facebook. That started to you know posted and get views themselves.
So when you think about this, you got to remember at the end of the day. Where are you the best fit, and I always try to tell people, even if you’re winning a game? If it’s not your game, you’re, probably losing right chances are you’re losing. So what does that mean in this practical situation? That might look like you doing your thing on Instagram, I’m a hundred thousand followers, maybe five hundred thousand followers and getting good engagement and all that stuff.
But maybe if you were doing the exact same thing almost on tik-tok, you might have two million followers and and who knows what your engagement or maybe you should be on YouTube? Alright. So, even if you’re winning don’t get stuck in the fact that you’re winning to keep you from experimenting and finding, if there’s someplace better and don’t just listen to the general places that people are talking about.
Because all of these things at the end of the day are opportunities that we talked about, but they don’t mean that you need to be there and that’s the beauty of reverse engineering where you belong. There’s a few questions that you can ask that can help with this. So here they are number one. What are your strengths? Are you really really good with the vigils or your visuals funny? Are they really short and using you’re good at doing that? Really short content? Do you need long-form? Do you do good at telling stories? What are your strengths? Are you really great with lyrics since there’s so many types of strengths figure out what those strengths are number two? Where is your audience? This is a huge one right, your potential audience, not the people that you want to follow you, the people who are likely to follow you.
Where do they spend a lot of attention? But that’s not the last thing because we know there’s, you know big platforms that have some of everybody’s audience. So that’s not the only thing number three. What type of content do you to create? Remember we already talked about whether your strengths. What is that lean towards this should help you and inform you on the type of content that you want to create, because you should want to create something in the lane of your strengths, because it’s going to make it easier.
Not only you to do one article but to create content at scale, and we know that social media. You know quantity is a very real thing. Those simple questions, your: what are your strengths? What type of content do you want to create, and where is your audience? That’s a great place to start, because then you start to look at the platforms and say what are the platforms with all of this criteria in consideration actually speak to these things and where I need to go.
Listen from there and figure it out from there and that’s pretty much it is that simple, because after that, it’s all experimentation. So once again, this is another episode of inside the network. What is inside the network, where we show you inclusive clips and artist sessions from inside brandman network.Com to show you how we go deeper into the artist process? And we can go back and forth as opposed to just answering these one-off questions and get the nuances of whatever your situation is.
So we can give you a custom answer for you, but not just a custom. Q & A session we’re building your marketing strategy with you. We’re building your advertising strategy with you and even greater with so many people need, is just developing your brand, which is the foundation that you do the rest of that mess on top of in the first place. So keep that in mind, especially if you’re an artist on a budget, you can’t afford a full-time marketer.
We help develop you into the systems that can market for you. We become your ongoing marketing and business managers and mentors. So we can help you build those branding and marketing systems where you don’t have to actually need a full-time marketing manager. You can do these things yourself, but it takes true progress and guidance versus just taking random information and trying to piecemeal it together and then starting back at square one after a year, hard time of work.
We’re seeing artists make far more progress in four months than they made in one or two years of just reading or in consuming random information from other places on the internet. That’s another episode of inside the network. Thank you. There are a couple of calls. What’s been your impression of the network or your experience so far, you like it man, I like how there’s the cause I mean only joined like less than a week ago and I’ve already.
This is my third call already so like I feel like it’s very you’re. Very approachable like if I had an urgent question: I’ve run out of questions already.
My favorite musician as of right now.
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